, is that the influence of the imitation goes
deep as well as extends wide. 'The matter,' as Wordsworth says, 'of
style very much comes out of the manner.' If you will endeavour to
write an imitation of the thoughts of Swift in a copy of the style of
Addison, you will find that not only is it hard to write Addison's
style, from its intrinsic excellence, but also that the more you
approach to it the more you lose the thought of Swift. The eager
passion of the meaning beats upon the mild drapery of the words. So you
could not express the plain thoughts of an Englishman in the grand
manner of a Spaniard. Insensibly, and as by a sort of magic, the kind
of manner which a man catches eats into him, and makes him in the end
what at first he only seems.

This is the principal mode in which the greatest minds of an age
produce their effect. They set the tone which others take, and the
fashion which others use. There is an odd idea that those who take what
is called a 'scientific view' of history need rate lightly the
influence of individual character. It would be as reasonable to say
that those who take a scientific view of nature need think little of
the influence of the sun. On the scientific view a great man is a great
new cause (compounded or not out of other causes, for I do not here, or
elsewhere in these papers, raise the question of free-will), but,
anyhow, new in all its effects, and all its results. Great models for
good and evil sometimes appear among men, who follow them either to
improvement or degradation.

I am, I know, very long and tedious in setting out this; but I want to
bring home to others what every new observation of society brings more
and more freshly to myself--that this unconscious imitation and
encouragement of appreciated character, and this equally unconscious
shrinking from and persecution of disliked character, is the main force
which moulds and fashions men in society as we now see it. Soon I shall
try to show that the more acknowledged causes, such as change of
climate, alteration of political institutions, progress of science, act
principally through this cause; that they change the object of
imitation and the object of avoidance, and so work their effect. But
first I must speak of the origin of nations--of nation-making as one
may call it--the proper subject of this paper.

The process of nation-making is one of which we have obvious examples
in the most recent times, and which is going on